Hip 'n chic and Chinese all over

Where, in the world, can you get a decent Chinese meal? Not in China, that country of a billion-plus people whose food, according to restaurateur Alan Yau, is "not that good". Not in London, where Chinese restaurants are stuck in a Fifties time warp for both food and d?cor.

True, there was the Zen chain of the late Eighties and early Nineties, with their gleaming glassy Rick Mather interiors, their tasteful lucky waterfalls (lucky because in China flowing water equals flowing cash), and clean-tasting food, but they peaked long ago, and then contracted. And since then, nothing.

Alan Yau, the inventor of the minimalist noodle chain Wagamama , is on a mission to put Chinese cuisine back where it belongs. This month he is opening Hakkasan, a restaurant that will serve "progressive but authentic" food. But what everyone is talking about is the "very, very expensive" interior (that is to say, more than £3 million), by Christian Liaigre, creator of the Mercer Hotel in New York, which is the sort of place around which the words "achingly" and "hip" habitually hover. In the past, Yau has worked with whiter-than-white architects like David Chipperfield and John Pawson, and spent hours discussing with the latter such concepts as "the wall which is not a wall". But Hakkasan will be "slightly kitsch: I asked Christian to bring back the dragon".

Yau likes to spend his money on d?cor and food more than location. True to form, Hakkasan has one of the least promising approaches of any new restaurant in London - off the Tottenham Court Road, into Hanway Street, last refuge of such dated concepts as a TV repair shop, a Flamenco Bar, and a golf shop, past the ghost of the defunct, ultra-cheap, Indian vegetarian restaurant the Mandeer, and into Hanway Place, which is dominated by the backside of a new commercial development. Only when the asphalt turns into granite paving, and the cheap brick walls turn into suave green stone, does the alchemy of Liaigre and lucre make itself known.

Inside it is decorative, and a little camp, but not in the ultra-ironic, Philippe Starck, "is that a tongue in your cheek or are you just pleased to see me" way. It's also a world away from the open-plan industrial scoffodromes of the last decade. It has green stone and red lights, illuminated blue panels and baby blue leather banquettes. There is lilac velvet and black oak and purple leather and, in the lavatories, Carrara marble. It has a full-height Chinese silk lantern, Chinese armoires for the coats and carved wooden screens. Only health and safety regulations stopped Liaigre growing moss on the stone behind the bar.

The waiters will be kitted out by William Chang, the costume designer for the classic Chinese film In the Mood for Love. And Hakkasan is so laid back about being Chinese that the name, confusingly, is Japanese.

Not that Yau isn't a serious fellow. His heroes include the two Lees, Bruce and Ang, and Philippe Starck. From Bruce, whom he didn't know, he learned that "you have to reach out and absorb what is useful"; from Philippe, whom he does know, "that things can be slightly chaotic, but work well because of the soul of a place, which comes from the height of a table, the relationships between people sitting, the light and music". Yau is also fervent about food. He talks in a reverential hush about the Pacific cod marinated in honey and champagne he's planning.

It's hard, when writing about things Chinese, not to slip into Confucius-he-say clich?s. It's harder still when your interviewee of his own volition brings up Bruce Lee and feng shui. But if any place can drag Anglo-Saxons out of their Widow Twankey perceptions of China, it will be Hakkasan.